Back in September, Alan Van Antwerp gave a presentation to the Office of Institutional Advancement. Van Antwerp’s role had recently expanded, from Upper School Drama Teacher and Winter Musical Director to Upper School Dean of Student Life (Peer Leadership, Advisory), a fact that, while exciting, was also a bit confusing to those who knew him. Suddenly Pingry’s brilliant director was sending out Dress Code rules once each week. At one point, one of Van Antwerp’s colleagues came into his new office to express concern. “I think you’re doing great,” he recalls his colleague saying, “but are you still doing theatre? Because I think you’re probably better at that.”
The beginning of the year has looked different for Van Antwerp, starting with a new office that has undergone enough renovations to make an HGTV crew jealous. Initially, there was a stark chair in the corner for visitors to sit in (“I’m going to warn you,” he cautioned apologetically, “It’s a metal seat in a really air conditioned room.”). His current desk, which he refers to as a whale, started out facing the hall, but he quickly found that didn’t work. “I thought, this is not the most efficient use of space.” So he turned his desk again, pleased with the results, “until the school year started and then it was a parade of people walking by and I felt like a Walmart greeter.” This prompted yet another desk move into what Van Antwerp refers to as “the worst of all the options”: the desk facing the back wall, with his own back to the world behind him.
Van Antwerp sighs. “[Upper School Director] Reid [Cottingham] and [Director of Institutional Advancement] Dave Fahey both said, at different points, the exact same thing, which was: if this were a mafia movie or a Western, I would be the first character taken out.” Shortly afterward, Head of School Tim Lear came by and offered design advice, followed by a few more colleagues offering input. “There were four people in here trying to figure it out,” he muses. Another reworking happened, which led to more lukewarm response (“This crushed my soul a little bit.”). Placing the desk outward meant the office door couldn’t shut since the desk jutted out one inch too far, so in the meantime, he’s ordered a smaller desk (set to arrive in 4–6 weeks, according to what he was told 4–6 weeks ago). New office chairs are here, along with a new lamp to warm the place up, which he enthusiastically demonstrates while narrating different moods for each light (“This is my ‘I’m reading a book!’ light. This is ‘I’m on a zoom!’ This is ‘I’m taking a nap!’) as it gets lighter and darker.
Of course, sometimes he’s not in his office at all, and instead visitors will encounter a closed door with a Post-it note, the letters IYKYK scrawled across it, indicating he is in another location entirely, which he asked to be kept off the record, so as not to “blow up his spot” with an endless stream of visitors. “The drama students know where to find me.”
None of this office redesign drama made it into his presentation to the OIA team. He focused on his expanded role, and on the arts at Pingry, and, specifically, on the sophomore class he teaches, Introduction to Acting. Dubbing it no less than an “Introduction on How to Be a Human Being”, Van Antwerp talked about the importance of the arts, occasionally interrupting his own praise for theatre with offhand commentary like “not to be Shakespearean, because I hate Shakespeare.” In his rollicking presentation, he implored the room to understand that the arts value extends far beyond any stage and lasts far longer than any ovation. Sometimes his sentiments were punctuated with phrases like “This is nothing against art people,” begging the question: isn’t Van Antwerp an art person? But he was thinking bigger picture, and he implored us to do the same.
Did you stop learning, at some point, what it means to be human? To remain curious, instead of giving in to judgment; to be comfortable with the uncertainty that comes with the pursuing a life unknown; a life that, if we’re not careful, can get swallowed up by the rush of busy schedules and cell phones and mundane pleasantries that lead to I’m doing fine, thanks.
Do you want to learn how to be a human being?
Do you ever really stop learning?
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To hear Van Antwerp tell it, one of the best ways to learn how to be human is by taking the Introduction to Acting class. He’s been teaching it for eight years, but he inherited it from Pingry’s former Drama Department Chair, Al Romano, and then from the current chair, Stephanie Romankow. Yes, it’s an acting class—it says so right there in the title—but it’s also so much more than that. In this class offered to sophomores, students start out learning the Meisner technique, which involves the students repeating an observation back and forth to each other. One student observes, “You’re wearing a blue shirt,” and the other student replies “I’m wearing a blue shirt” and they go back and forth this way for ten or twenty minutes, paying attention not to just the words but to what’s going on beneath the surface: the irritation that may creep into one’s voice, the sense of joy one might be exuding, a moment of sadness that slips through. To an outside observer, it can seem as if nothing profound is going on. But the students are learning to really listen to each other, to be curious about what is often left unsaid at the surface of our everyday conversations. For Kayla Goldstein ’27, the class is one of her favorites. “You kind of take a step back and see someone for how they’re actually feeling,” she says, “and not just what they’re saying.”
As far as Van Antwerp is concerned, the class gets students to “see the world without their phones or computers, and it gets them to retrain their ears and their brains to what human connection is all about.” While so much gets lost in the rush of the day-to-day of our busy lives, the class takes the phone-free Mondays and Wednesdays sentiment a bit further, feeling like a true throwback to a time when kids could be fully present. Over the course of the year, students learn what Van Antwerp believes are some of the most valuable soft skills for their future success: connection, empathy, curiosity, and presence. And these skills are necessary for a wide range of seemingly unrelated fields.
Alexandra Weber ’20 credits Introduction to Acting for giving her the skills to ace an interview that landed her an internship in investment banking, a career she is passionate about to this day. “You have to be able to listen and think on your feet and pivot,” Alexandra says of the competitive interview process, where behavioral- and scenario-based questions are common. “I found in my interviews my best moments came from a question I didn’t necessarily study, but ones where I was able to use that muscle that I used in the class. And it’s a skill I’ve used in every interview.”
It’s something she uses to this day. “I was in a really important client meeting a week ago,” she says. “It was for a very large client that we were fighting against to get the sole financial advisor role on. In investment banking, you come up with these eighty- to ninety-page decks, but honestly, you never know what the client is going to ask. So when the client asks something unexpected, the partners—who have been doing this for twenty to thirty years—they need to pivot, or improv, to show how much knowledge they have in this situation. I saw in real time these partners that have been doing this for many years had to pivot. Because no question is the same. No client is the same.”
Even though the boardroom is different from the stage, the lessons from one can propel the success of the other. “When onstage in front of hundreds of people, like when I did Chicago at Pingry, there are so many things that can go wrong or unexpected. Nothing ever goes as perfect as in your rehearsal,” she admits. “If you’re not comfortable pivoting or with improv, you’re going to struggle. You’re going to have to pivot. It’s a muscle that you have to work.”
What started with the Meisner technique—bouncing observations back and forth between a scene partner in class—deepened into a skill that often gets lost in relationships: curiosity.
“That’s one of the major pillars of drama,” says Alexandra. “In class, you raise your hand and just think about what you’re going to say. But in acting, that doesn’t work. It teaches you to process and respond quickly. You’re not thinking about what they’re saying on a surface level,” she emphasizes.
Everything students do in Introduction to Acting is designed to get them to consider the motivations below the surface. “We are in our heads all the time and we’re always preparing to respond with something,” says Van Antwerp. “When I ask you a question, or I say something, you give an immediate response most of the time, because—especially in today’s environment—I have to get to the answer right away. So I’m thinking about what I need to say rather than listening to what you’re saying and how you’re saying it.” This is why the repetition of lines the class does with the Meisner technique is so transformative. “The lines are not important,” Van says. “We’re taking that entire thing out of the equation of how you’re supposed to respond. And the only way you can respond is just being with somebody. And I don’t think we take enough time to just be with somebody. We’re in a rush.”
As Van Antwerp says this, streams of students and teachers pass by his office, some rambunctious and some quiet. He looks out at them before continuing.
“We’re in our heads all the time, and this is getting you out of that mentality of I have to respond to I’m lucky enough just to be there to respond. Right?” He pauses here. “It’s a gift to respond to somebody.”
Wherever life takes you, be it Broadway or Wall Street, the ability to truly connect with others is both simple and yet, in the rush of our daily lives, can feel rare and profound. When it comes to listening to those around her, Alexandra finds that the skills she learned taking Introduction to Acting have carried her far into the boardroom—and into a life more fully lived as a human being. “You really work on digesting things in a really interesting way,” she says, before pausing and adding, “I really, really try to listen to people before I respond.”
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To contact the author: Sara Courtney